Thanks to recent medical record standards and distributed technology, the exchange of medical documents has become readily available.Healthcare institutions are able to share documents with other providers and specialty care facilities as well as third party billing vendors and pharmacies; however, patients who require medical transport are still subject to rudimentary exchange of information through […]

There is an expectation that when a patient is transferred between two different medical institutions, their medical records will follow them. While this is becoming true for the majority of the patient population, there is a gap for those who must be medically transported by either ambulance, helicopter or fixed wing. Developing this type of IT architecture, our research will focus on properly aligning the concept of electronic health record interoperability across the transport medicine environment in a seamless fashion as well as address the contribution, expectations and promises associated with a universal electronic health record as defined by the Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP).

Electronic Health Records enhance patient care across medicine enabling providers to view historical information from the patients chart, viewing results from participating agencies, sharing notes with providers outside their institution and utilizing integrated support systems which protect against medication errors and redundancies. The field of transport medicine revolves around emergent patient transports by ambulance, helicopter and plane. These are resource poor environments and, coincidentally, occur during the most critical times of the patient’s condition. The need to support transport clinicians with the most valid pertinent information about each patient is the main focus to our research. We proposed an ontological approach around transport medicine protocols which associated multiple diseases and their associated symptoms. We have developed semantic queries using the patient’s current symptoms as input and the query result is analyzed by an algorithm that we created to derive probable diseases. The algorithm uses types of associated symptoms based on the ontology to quantify a confidence level for each possible disease. If the disease ruled in, we presented this information to the clinician as part of a decision support system. We used this output to query the patient’s existing EHR for relevant medical history regarding the current disease process. We provide both the probable diagnoses along with the patient’s relevant history in a single XML resource document.

In august of 2006 the United States government passed an executive order to implement electronic health records by 2014. Since then the world of Health Information Technology has spun into a whirlwind of activity. Major players, including the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise and the Health Information Technology Standards Panel, have begun to define the standards that will provide the backbone for EHRs. These organizations first aimed to standardize major functions of the healthcare enterprise. They have adopted standards developed from experts and existing IHE profiles. These would include patient care records, medication management, radiology imaging, laboratory results, and clinical research. Areas seen by lesser patient populations would be secondary. Transport medicine has taken a back burner since the whirlwind. We aim to develop an IHE profile for Transport Medicine based on a hybrid of enterprise architecture methodologies. Our leading framework, The Open Group Architecture Framework, will guide the implementation of this IHE profile for Interfacility Transport.